The world before the review system was entirely based on word of mouth and hence marketing for stores and other businesses was purely based on taking help from consumers to spread the business either directly or indirectly. Google & Yelp changed this behavior completely, today an average consumer spends a good amount of time researching the online reviews for the store before visiting. There are many factors such as proximity that matters, but nevertheless, if a user feels finds a store that has 5 stars or a 4.5+ star rating online, he/she will be even ready to pay a visit on the other end of the city. The online review system has increased and is going on increasing every year. More and more businesses and stores are adopting the technology, most of the feedback which once upon a time was via person to person, now its more online. An online feedback system is taken more seriously since there are silently hundreds of thousands of people watching it sitting on their comfy sofa. This feedback loop is very important for the business to grow and as well as provide the best service to the consumer. To search for online reviews of a salon near you, click here.
With the sudden growth in the review world, how do we understand which is a true review and which is false?
The major two store review platforms are Google Reviews & Yelp
Top 5 ways to identify which is the best store.
- Check the rating– This is the most basic of all, always check the star rating on the store. The higher the better, if there are two stores in the same category, let us say you are deciding between store A which has a rating of 4.8, and Store B which has a rating of 4.5, even if Store A is around 5 miles away, it always helps to pick Store A over store B
- Check the sample size on the rating – If we take the same example of Store A and B, please check how many users have provided the rating. If store A has a rating of 4.8 from 10 users while store B has a rating of 4.5 from 80 users, always choose a higher number of users. This means there are 80 people who on average have rated the store at 4.5 while only 10 users have rated the store 4.8 in the case of Store A. Always pick a store that has a higher number of reviews.
- Visit as many review platforms as possible– Not see google reviews, but also check reviews on yelp. The user base is different sometimes, the ease of usability matters in this case.
- Average out the ratings from Multiple platforms- if you have a store A which has a 5 on yelp but has only 4 on google reviews, average out and calculate the average rating which in this case is 4.5, this helps when you are comparing it with several stores. Some of the businesses spend money and time to have many users on one platform while the other there are genuine users.
- Identify genuine users & their comments- While reading the comments, identify if the user is a real user or a online bot, the platforms ensure of this very carefully but still then there might be a chance of few comments being a bot, always check for a 3rd person language, like “I visited the store, the owner was very friendly…”
We hope this helps in identifying the best store near you to visit. Please do visit our website to get such clarity between stores that will help you to make a decision faster. Select your town/city from the dropdown or just find your zip code in the search